Business Communication Assignment: Managing Internal Communication In A Small Team
Question
Task:
You will individually write a short self-reflection essay that analyses your personal communication experiences within the business context. You must pick one of following topics: small group team communication, manager-subordinate communication, or intercultural communication. You may pick the same topic as your individual group presentation topic, but please remember this essay focuses upon your personal communication experiences within the business context. With your chosen topic in mind, you must provide an example of effective and ineffective communication. Herein business communication assignment you will need to explain why the communication is effective and why the communication is ineffective. Next, you will need to discuss what you could do to improve your identified ineffective communication. Here you will need to identify specific communication behaviours that would improve upon your ability to communicate (as directly related to your previously identified ineffective communication) within the business context.
For example, you could focus upon your intercultural communication. Think about your intercultural communication--What do you do well? What could be improved? Based upon your answers to these questions describe one intercultural communication skill or activity that you do effectively and one skill or activity that you feel you do ineffectively. Please make sure you back up each example by explaining why the communication is either effective or ineffective. Next, you will need to discuss how you would specifically change your ineffective communication—essentially describe the remedial communication behaviours and justify why these behaviours would be effective.
Answer
Introduction
The current business communication assignment is a short self-reflective report that analyses your personal communication experiences within the business context. Business communication has been a very crucial element in all kinds of successful business organisations and works as the mainstream of growth or development of business. Team communication constitutes a significant part of business communication, and effective internal communication in a short team includes areas of various means of communication with team members. This assessment presents a brief self-reflection essay on personal communication experiences in the case of managing internal communication in a small group team. The overall discussion involves instances of effective and ineffective internal communications in a short team and identifying specific communication behaviours for improving ineffective communication.
Discussion
An effective internal communication system is defined as one of the continuous processes required to follow by every manager for prompting the necessary employee engagement activities. Managing the contemporary forms of business operations determined as one of the challenging aspects required to perform by every manager across the world, where internal communication considered being as the integrated part of business management. Therefore, I have always been careful of maintaining effective internal communication in my small team to establish a congenial working relationship with the employees to ensure that the workers do not hesitate to resolve any kind of work-related issue that might arise in the organisation.
While I was working as a supervisor in a stock-taking and inventory management company, I got particular scopes of involving in small group team communication in due course. I can remember that I was responsible for supervising a small team of 5 members in the work of counting inventory stock in different retail organisations and stores with the help of a barcode scanner. I feel the need to frequently interact with my team members for gaining updates on work progress; I mainly intend to apply the skills of open discussion and active listening as part of my internal communication efforts. Ineffective internal communication in the team, with a lack of quality in between the managers and subordinated, results in poor internal, interpersonal business relationships. I mostly emphasize verbal communication with others to clearly understand their concerns or issues, and they do not feel problems communicating their issues with me openly. In a business context, I always focus on engaging in open interaction and discussion within my team as I try maintaining an overall standard of my internal communication for the greater convenience of my team members. Communication quality is more significant for team performance than communication frequency (Marlow et al., 2018). This is why I mostly emphasize active listening before sharing my views with them so that I can provide the best-required guidance to them as per the challenges they face in their tasks. Therefore, I think active listening and open discussion are important skills of my internal communication within the team.
In my view, in the case of internal communication in my small group team, I was able in applying my conversation and active listening skills well most of the time. In this regard, I must state that using the skills of active listening and open conversation with my team helps me make sense of the complexities associated with work, specifically because of the scopes of considering diverse ideas of others (Koehler et al., 2021). Thus, my ability to maintain openness along with active listening proves to be of much significance in improving my personal internal communication in a business context. Oppositely, in many cases, I faced the issue of ineffective skills of applying non-verbal communication. In many cases, I was unable to reflect appropriate body language, look or reaction, mostly because of the influence of work pressure and stress, which sometimes failed to match my words. This, often, creates a sense of less trust, clarity and rapport while communicating with my team.
Moreover, this problem in non-verbal communication also impacted my ability to straight-talking. Therefore, I felt a problem in applying effective decision-making skills, which adversely affected my overall business communication ability. Therefore, I could improve my non-verbal and straight-talking skills.
In particular cases, I can use my communication skills effectively; however, sometimes, this becomes ineffective. Whenever I interact with my team members or engage in open discussion of issues, they face in their work performance, I always give much importance to effectively applying active listening skills. For example, I think that active listening is a particular skill that allows me to pay sincere attention to what my team members are trying to convey to me. Accordingly, I can clarify their arguments. Most importantly, I can use my listening skill effectively because this mostly helps me in structural listening and showing a sense of empathy to their feelings, as a crucial part of internal communication. I have felt that active listening thus assists me in empathetic listening and thereby understanding what my team is conveying. This is the reason why my efforts of active listening-based communication, mostly, have proved to be highly effective and fruitful for providing appropriate guidance to them.
On the other hand, I do not think that I can express a bold and highly confident body movement and gestures most of the time, specifically when I feel concerns about stress due to high work pressure. For example, when, in such a situation, my team members ask me for particular information or want to discuss any specific challenge faced by them, I often feel a lack of confidence in taking a fixed decision, which gets reflected in my body posture and gestures. Such weakness in my non-verbal communication skill often leads to reduced team confidence and, thus, deteriorated performance in stock taking. According to the Expectancy Violations Theory of Business Communication, this can be stated that the inability of reflecting effective non-verbal (body language and gesture) communicative messages is perceived by my team members unfavorably in various situations. Therefore, this is a clear indicator of my ineffective and weak non-verbal communication skills, which I mostly do in ineffective ways, failing to produce any desired positive impacts on my business communication ability (Lucas & Rawlins, 2015).
As per my consideration, for improving my non-verbal communication skills, I have to pay attention to nonverbal signals useful in business communication perspectives. Since, specifically, I face trouble with my improper body posture and language, impacting my overall communication in a small team, I have to focus on developing a repetitive body language for drawing the additional focus of my team members to my ideas at work. Therefore, it would be better to undertake particular training in improving non-verbal business communication. I have to emphasize learning different body language cues and reactions important in business communication and applying those in the practical field in small group team communication. In such cases, I have to focus on improving specific non-verbal communication behaviours such as managing personal space in a team, maintaining direct eye contact with staff, and demonstrating high confidence and empathy (Gozalova et al., 2016). This will help improve my internal non-verbal communication by incorporating a higher level of assertiveness and confident nature in my body language. Hence, these are the specific non-verbal communication behaviours, which would be crucial for me to avoid any such scopes of poor or ineffective communication within my small group team.
Moreover, as in many cases, I get under the influence of stress or concerns under pressure and critical situations; I would train to improve my overall confidence, intelligence and assertiveness as a leader for effectively communicating and guiding my short team in all situations. This can assist me in developing boldness, assertiveness, and confidence in my gestures, which can directly impact my non-verbal communicative ability. Thus, through proper training, improving my body language and associated behaviour would help me depict a sufficient level of confidence in my behaviour while communicating with my staff or discussing specific issues. Apart from undergoing non-verbal communication skill training, it would also be better for me to read books and business cases relating to non-verbal communication with particular emphasis on body language and postures of business managers and team leaders. However, in this connection, I also consider taking counsel with my seniors regarding different means of improving internal communication ability in terms of non-verbal communication skills.
Conclusion
From the overall discussion, this can be stated that my personal experience of internal communication in my small group team is positive in the case of mainly my verbal and active listening-based communication. Still, sufficient scopes are there for improving my non-verbal communication skills. It is clear that I often get unable to demonstrate appropriate body gestures and language before my team members, specifically when under high work pressure, which leaves adverse impacts on the team's performance. Therefore, I must follow particular steps for developing my overall non-verbal skills, emphasizing the improvement of body language and gestures as part of my business communication skills.
Reference List
Gozalova, M. R., Gazilov, M. G., Kobeleva, O. V., Seredina, M. I., & Loseva, E. S. (2016). Non-verbal communication in the modern world. Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 7(4), 553-553. https://www.richtmann.org/journal/index.php/mjss/article/view/9354/9033
Koehler, A., Ertmer, P., & Newby, T. (2021). Discussion Facilitation Strategies and Design Skill Development: Examining the Relationship. Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning, 15(1). https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/ijpbl/article/download/28749/36851
Lucas, K., & Rawlins, J. D. (2015). The competency pivot: Introducing a revised approach to the business communication curriculum. Business communication assignment Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, 78(2), 167-193. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.956.6866&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Marlow, S. L., Lacerenza, C. N., Paoletti, J., Burke, C. S., & Salas, E. (2018). Does team communication represent a one-size-fits-all approach?: A meta-analysis of team communication and performance. Organisational behavior and human decision processes, 144, 145-170. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/am/pii/S074959781630125X
